How to get justice for Chanel
If there was more justice on this planet, Chanel Petro-Nixon would be 30 years old and rising in a professional career, maybe even starting a family. But she never got the chance. Chanel was murdered at age 16, before she could go to senior prom or graduate high school or show up for the first time on a college campus. She was strangled to death, her clothed body discovered in a garbage bag in front of 212 Kingston Ave. in Crown Heights in June 2006.
It is time for a group of top New York officials — including Brooklyn D.A. Eric Gonzalez, Controller Scott Stringer, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Yvette Clarke and Attorney General Letitia James — to make good on public promises to discover and hold accountable Chanel’s killer.
Gonzalez’s office believes he is a man named Veron Primus, a former classmate who she was supposed to meet up with on Father’s Day 2006, the day she disappeared. Primus is on the island of St. Vincent supposedly in jail awaiting trial in the murder of a travel agent named Sharleen Greaves in 2015.
I say supposedly because last week Primus escaped — for the second time in just over a year — from Her Majesty’s Prison on St. Vincent. A team of heavily-armed officers recaptured him the next day — the tiny island has only 110,000 residents — and he was sentenced to 24 months for the escape.
That buys Primus more time to avoid justice. He appears to be toying with the legal system on St. Vincent, dragging out an already slow process so that he doesn’t face charges in Brooklyn.
Details of the capers reveal an astoundingly lax approach to law enforcement on St. Vincent. Last October, after Primus escaped, four prison officers were arrested; one was later charged with conspiracy to help Primus break out.
Primus turned himself in 12 hours after escaping, and was sentenced to 16 months confinement for that first jailbreak. Since then, life in Her Majesty’s Prison appears to include access to a cell phone, which Primus used to send WhatsApp messages and have regular video calls and phone sex with a woman outside the jail.
Following this month’s jailbreak, the country’s superintendent of prisons was replaced. Primus’s phone sex partner, who harbored him during his brief moment of freedom, was sentenced to a year in jail.
Primus has spent more than half his life behind bars, charged with crimes including rape, burglary, kidnapping, imprisonment, murder and escape. All along the way, he appears to have found allies and accomplices — guards, girlfriends, other inmates and a fellow escapee (who is also accused of murder).
Primus claims to have broken out in order to draw public attention to his St. Vincent murder case, but the more likely motive is to keep committing a string of small offenses to stave off the day of reckoning on the murder charges — hoping, perhaps, that evidence and witnesses will disappear.
That must not happen. And that’s where New York politicians need to step in.
Pressure needs to be put on the Serious Offences Court in St. Vincent, which is moving as slow as molasses on trying Primus in his 2015 murder case and obviously cannot keep him in custody.
Some personal persuasion by James and Gonzalez — and, perhaps, an offer of legal assistance — might get the system to function with more speed.
Meantime Clarke, who chairs the Caribbean Caucus in Congress, can no doubt connect with the island’s long-serving prime minister, Ralph Gonsalves, and perhaps lay the groundwork for Primus’s extradition. And both Stringer and Adams, as leading candidates for mayor, should vow to make the case a priority if elected.
It’s time to make good on the steady, patient effort by which community leaders and elected officials have held vigils, marches and rallies in the search for justice.
The News contributed $5,000 to a reward fund that eventually topped out at more $38,000, and cops from the 77th Precinct, where Chanel’s body was found, held charity basketball tournaments to raise more cash for the fund.
Civil rights leaders got involved. The Rev. Al Sharpton joined me on “America’s Most Wanted,” calling for tips, and the Rev. Taharka Robinson has been tireless in his efforts to organize community rallies and provide assistance to Chanel’s courageous and heartbroken parents, Gavin Petro and Lucita Nixon.
Politicians who got personally involved include Brooklyn DA Joe Hynes and his successor, Ken Thompson, who indicted Primus in absentia in June 2016 — a full decade after Chanel’s murder and just four months before Thompson’s own tragic death from cancer.
All that work will pay off. Someone must answer for the brutal taking of one of our young shining lights.